Illusion: capitalism versus marxism

Sure, Marxism clashes with capitalism over fairness toward wage slaves in an argument over proportion of the share of production between owner and laborer. But since on the capitalist side there are companies ranging from Asian sweat shops to adult day care with free internet all day and Friday lunch break cookouts, this isn't even a critical division.

What each share:

universal equality

exhaustion or diversion of said equals from having future-altering political and cultural involvement

censure and erasure of the story of human history past and future

central control as public party or private oligarchy respectively

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With access to all the money they could wish for and more, the finance-capitalists in Boltonís narrative were, and are, primarily motivated by a desire for power, and their ultimate aim was not even more money per se, but the enduring ability to shape the world to their convenience, which translates into a collectivised planet of producers and consumers.

Marxism was useful in as much as it was a materialistic ideology that destroyed traditional structures and values and turned citizens into secular, deracinated wage slaves, irrespective of race, gender, age, creed, disability, or sexual orientation.

Capitalism was useful in as much as it made money the measure of all things and created a consumer culture that ultimately turned citizens into debt slaves, also irrespective of race, gender, and so on.

In this manner, Marxism and capitalism were seen as complementary, as well as a method of pacifying the citizenry: too busy labouring in the factory or in the cubicle, and too befuddled by daydreams of shopping and entertainment during their free time, the citizens of this global order, fearful of losing their jobs and not being able to buy things or satisfy their creditors, are left with little inclination to, or energy for, rebellion.

The Black-Scholes formula had passed the market test. But as banks and hedge funds relied more and more on their equations, they became more and more vulnerable to mistakes or over-simplifications in the mathematics.

"The equation is based on the idea that big movements are actually very, very rare. The problem is that real markets have these big changes much more often that this model predicts," says Stewart. "And the other problem is that everyone's following the same mathematical principles, so they're all going to get the same answer."

Now these were known problems. What was not clear was whether the problems were small enough to ignore, or well enough understood to fix. And then in the late 1990s, two remarkable things happened.

"The inventors got the Nobel Prize for Economics," says Stewart. "I would argue they thoroughly deserved to get it."

Sure, Marxism clashes with capitalism over fairness toward wage slaves in an argument over proportion of the share of production between owner and laborer. But since on the capitalist side there are companies ranging from Asian sweat shops to adult day care with free internet all day and Friday lunch break cookouts, this isn't even a critical division.

What each share:

universal equality

exhaustion or diversion of said equals from having future-altering political and cultural involvement

censure and erasure of the story of human history past and future

central control as public party or private oligarchy respectively

Another idea they both share is that all or most issues can be solved via economics and wealth levels. This is the worst kind of materialism. A less decadent materialism would recognise the importance of values and other 'intangible' factors that are not in fact intangible but relate to environment, genetics, psychology and human culture.

I think capitalism in it's early stages (Libertarian capitalism) evaded many of the items on your list. The soft marxist capitalism (Keynesian capitalism) that replaced libertarianism in response to the depression changed this:

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Advocates of Keynesian economics argue that private sector decisions sometimes lead to inefficient macroeconomic outcomes which require active policy responses by the public sector, particularly monetary policy actions by the central bank and fiscal policy actions by the government to stabilize output over the business cycle.[1] The theories forming the basis of Keynesian economics were first presented in The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, published in 1936. The interpretations of Keynes are contentious and several schools of thought claim his legacy. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keynesian_economics